ASP Tutorial

What is ASP? ASP (Active Server Pages) is a Microsoft technology that enables you to make dynamic and interactive web pages. –ASP usually runs inside IIS. –IIS stands (Internet Information Services) is Microsoft's Web server. PWS (Personal Web Server) is Microsoft’s Web server program for individuals hosting Web page files from a personal computer. –Personal Web Server is a smaller-scale version of Microsoft’s IIS technology and is therefore limited in its capabilities. ASP Compatibility –IIS runs on Windows NT 4.0 or later. –PWS runs on Windows 95 or later. –ASP can also run on different Web servers such as Apache, ChiliASP, and InstantASP.

What is ASP? What is an ASP File? –An ASP file is just the same as an HTML file –An ASP file can contain text, HTML, XML, and scripts. –Scripts in an ASP file are executed on the server. –An ASP file has the file extension ".asp“. How Does ASP Differ from HTML? –When a browser requests an HTML file, the server returns the file –When a browser requests an ASP file, IIS passes the request to the ASP engine. The ASP engine reads the ASP file, line by line, and executes the scripts in the file. Finally, the ASP file is returned to the browser as plain HTML

What is ASP? What is an ASP.NET? –ASP.NET (originally called ASP+) is the next generation ASP. –ASP.NET is different than its predecessor in two major ways: It supports code written in compiled languages such as Visual Basic, C++, C# and Perl, It features server controls that can separate the code from the content, allowing WYSIWYG editing of pages. –Although ASP.NET is not backwards compatible with ASP, it is able to run side by side with ASP applications. ASP.NET files can be recognized by their.aspx extension.

Why use ASP? What can ASP do for you? –Dynamically edit, change or add any content of a Web page –Respond to user queries or data submitted from HTML forms –Access any data or databases and return the results to a browser –Customize a Web page to make it more useful for individual users –The advantages of using ASP instead of CGI and Perl, are those of simplicity and speed –Provides security since your ASP code can not be viewed from the browser –Since ASP files are returned as plain HTML, they can be viewed in any browser –Clever ASP programming can minimize the network traffic

Running ASP How to install IIS and run ASP on Windows XP Professional (Not available on Windows XP Home Ed.). 1.Insert the Windows XP Professional CD-Rom into your CD- Rom Drive 2.From your Start Button, go to Settings, and Control Panel 3.In the Control Panel window select Add/Remove Programs 4.In the Add/Remove window select Add/Remove Windows Components 5.In the Wizard window check Internet Information Services, click OK 6.An Inetpub folder will be created on your harddrive 7.Open the Inetpub folder, and find a folder named wwwroot 8.Create a new folder, like MyWeb, under wwwroot. 9.Use a text editor to write some ASP code, save the file as hello.asp in the MyWeb folder 10.Open your browser and type in " to view your ASP page

Writing ASP Example: Hello.asp Example: Welcome.asp You can use HTML tags to format the text! ") %> This text is styled with the style attribute! ") %>